Virtual reality: My Oculus Rift experience – Reader’s Feature

Being a gamer all my life and not being fully content with the new generation of consoles I wanted to experience a new way of playing games, that felt significant and a generation leap forward.

Initially, I was veering towards the HTC Vive, plainly because it was a more of a complete package allowing you for room scale VR. My decision to order the Oculus Rift was to do with price, how I was going to use VR, and wanting to support Oculus for bringing this tech back from the dead. I felt the space needed for room scale VR with the HTC Vive was not something I could accommodate due to my living room area and how I usually play games, which is sitting down with a controller.
However, I will look towards getting the Oculus Touch controllers in the future, if there is enough experiences to support them. Plus, the room scale VR has smaller space requirements vs. the HTC Vive.

Lastly, I didn’t want to be locked into a Steam-only environment and the Oculus Rift offers both their own native store and most Steam games seemed to be compatible with Oculus Rift, and possibly Xbox/Microsoft store in the future. Have discounted the PlayStation VR purely due to supporting a PlayStation-only environment.
The Oculus Rift VR headset seems to be very sturdy, it also has a premium quality feel to it. You can use the included headphones or output via your speakers and separate headphones as well. Upon wearing the headset I have experienced condensation around the screens. This seems to be a symptom of wearing the headset and breathing through your nose. It does calm down after around the first five minutes of use, but seems to be unavoidable and isn’t a massive issue but just a little bit annoying.

All the hype seems to be warranted once you put on the headset. It feels like stepping into a virtual world. Going through the initial setup steps and a few of the tech demos from the Oculus Dreamdeck app makes you understand the power of VR and the head tracking acts as a mouse pointer. The first demo shows you standing on an alien planet with an alien standing in front of you; it feels eerie and you get the immediate sense of scale of the environment around you.